Losing weight: I feel like I've had that goal my entire life and have spent a lot of time and effort at it. Result? Most of the time I just maintain my weight and it's a weight that is more than it should be.
Last April, I joined my husband in going to a CrossFit gym. If you don't know what that is, here's a link to some info on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfit. He, of course, lost 30 pounds doing it and gained a ton of muscle. I, however, gained a few total pounds. Arg and grrrr!
I know I've gotten fitter, there's no question, but I really wanted to lose weight too. I wanted to lose the final stubborn 6 (or so) pounds of baby weight. But when I reached +9 pre-pregnancy weight last month, I knew I needed to make some changes.
So, having read that keeping a food journal helps you lose twice the weight, I signed up with http://www.blogger.com/www.fitday.com. It's actually amazing. You can enter how much you'd like to weigh by what date and it will tell you how many calories you need a day to reach your goal. You enter the foods you eat and it automatically tallies your calories. It was through that journal that I suddenly realized that I was eating 700 calories in trail mix a day! Um, that's not a prescription for weight loss.
I made a goal to lose 10 pounds by January 10. You'll notice we're a week away from that. I'm down 6 pounds right now. Can I lose 4 pounds in a week? I'm certainly going to try because I'm going to weigh in front of my husband on the 10th. Too bad that wasn't motivation enough to avoid those 3 raspberry muffins this morning. Weight loss is a toughy, y'all.
So, root me on and I'll root you on in your goals!
2 comments:
K, tell me more about this crossfit? Did you do a specific program or is it just a lot of those 3 different things?
It's a ton of different movements in an intense fashion. For instance, one workout is 50 of each of the following movements: pushups, sit ups, pull ups, toes to bar (hang from a bar and touch your feet to it), wall balls (take a medicine ball, squat down and when you rise up you through a ball high against a wall), jump rope, box jumps, burpees (get down on the ground, then push ups, then jump up and clap above your head), or barbell stuff, etc. Or another could be 400 meter sprints with a minute rest in between. If you're not fit enough to do some of the moves, you can scale them back so you keep up the intensity and still keep moving.
It's a whole crazy variety and it's different every day. Actually, there are some workouts that come back on occasion and then you can measure how fast you completed them compared to how fast you were before. That's how you can really tell you're getting fitter.
It's not an at-home program but classes at a gym. I like that there are other people there sweating it out with me, battling the clock. I see someone else going faster than me and I realize that I can do more. The trainer is there to ensure you're doing each move properly and not injuring yourself. They also motivate. It's a community. I, it turns out, need an external motivator like a class to go to and someone else telling me what to do or I get lazy and a) don't go at all, b) go but do a wussy workout, or c) don't push as hard as I could have had I other people around me supporting me.
Here's what our workout was today (although I didn't go because my neck is hurting. Boo.) http://utecrossfit.com/?p=767 TGU is a turkish get up which is the complicated move with a kettle bell. It takes a lot of learning to know how to do all the moves but they're meant to be all over body moves that strengthen your whole body.
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